a. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to microelectronic devices, and more particularly to maintaining the timing performance of such microelectronic devices using clock buffer circuitry.
b. Background of Invention
As devices shrink, their operational variability also increases. Particularly, as new technologies emerge, in the interest of power consumption reduction, the device operating voltages also decrease with reduced device size. The impact of this device variability in turn may also be further increased by the reduced device operating voltages. A critical variability in device operation may, for example, be propagation delays through the device. Thus, device size reductions leading to reduced operating voltages may create unpredictable variations in the propagation times (i.e., delay) though the devices. In certain circuit implementations such as clock buffer circuits, these propagation delay changes may cause timing differences that subsequently lead to operational failures imposed by the potential occurrence of race conditions.